Slider

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This article is about the baseball pitch. For other possible meanings see slider (disambiguation). For the cricket delivery, see slider (cricket).

In baseball, a slider, or nickel curve, is a pitch halfway between a curveball and a fastball, with less break but more speed than the curve. It tends to drop less and move toward or away from the batter more than a curve. The extra speed can fool the hitter into thinking it is a fastball until it's too late. Some pitchers also use a cut fastball (or cutter), which is one step closer than the slider to the fastball on the spectrum between fastballs and curves. A pitch that has movement similar to both a slider and a curveball is sometimes called a slurve.

The slider is also sometimes called "the great equalizer" and "the pitcher's friend," as its development caused pitchers to regain some dominance over hitters. The slider also causes great stress and wear on a pitcher's arm: for this reason the Dodgers organization forbade its pitchers to throw sliders for many years after the pitch became popular.

George Blaeholder, a St. Louis Browns pitcher of the 1920's and 1930's, has sometimes been credited with inventing the slider, although the slider was likely used before he began throwing it. Cleveland Indians pitcher George Uhle, whose career started about a decade before Blaeholder, may have actually invented the pitch, and he may have originated the name slider. Said Uhle, "It was a sailing fastball, and that's how come I named it the slider. The real slider is a sailing fastball." Blaeholder, however, was the first pitcher who extensively threw the pitch.

There are numerous techniques for throwing a slider. Generally, the ball is gripped closer to the finger tips than the curveball (which tends to be more wrapped into the palm by the fingers). The pitcher then exerts hard horizontal or downward spin action at the release point to get both velocity and violent late movement on the pitch.

A "backdoor slider" is a sharply breaking pitch that travels safely outside the hitting zone where the batter has maxiumum plate coverage, but then has late movement and veers over the corner. The purpose of a well-thrown backdoor slider is to fool the batter into taking the pitch, and have the umpire call it a strike. "Backdoor" in that it's a surreptitious attempt to gain strike 3, and that from the batter's vantage, the "backdoor" is the area just off the plate's outside corner.

It is most accurate to call a pitch a backdoor slider if the pitcher is righthanded and the batter is lefthanded. While the same principles would apply to a left pitcher, righty batter matchup, lefthanded pitchers throw breaking balls that approach from the outside frequently - using that tactic as a core pitching strategy. It's anticipated behavior from lefties, and therefore not surreptitious, and not "backdoor." And when a righthanded pitcher throws a slider outside to a righthanded batter, the pitch is breaking away, and not back over. So that pitch is merely a "slider away" or "slider low and away," as they are frequently called.

A ‘hanging slider’ is a slider that suffers from poor location in the hitting zone over the plate, insufficient spin, or both - making it very vulnerable to the batters swing. A famous hanging slider, often replayed on television, is Dennis Eckersley’s home run pitch to Kirk Gibson in game 1 of the 1988 World Series. Eckersley was reknowned for his excellent slider, but that immortal pitch was over the heart of the plate and had no break on it. Gibson crushed it to right for his famous home run.

Pitchers known for throwing sliders include:

[edit] External links

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